Tommaso Mazzanti, son of the founders of All'Antico Vinaio, today heads a group with 250 employees specializing in creating some of the most delicious and famous sandwiches in Italy and now even in New York and LA. In Florence they two shops both in the heart of the city center, one just minutes away from Piazza della Signoria and the other in Santa Maria Novella.
Every day there is a queue of hundreds and hundreds of people who come from all over the world to eat and enjoy the stuffed “schiacciata”, the typical Tuscan focaccia. The shop has an endless selection of cold cuts, cheese, and homemade creams like the truffle cream and the artichoke cream. The owner is Tommaso Mazzanti, a Florentine Doc born in 1988, who within a few years took over the family shop and created an empire, made up of directly managed shops in Milan, Rome, New York and - since last May - Turin. The future? "Well, we are now in New York and Los Angeles - may be Miami next.
Initially Tommaso's parents opened in 1989 a rotisserie and he converted to street food in 2004. It was when a very young Tommaso took over that things starting to change; «Age certainly gave me a hand, since around 2008 I was twenty and I opened the Facebook page when social networks were in their infancy. I did it to keep in touch with the people who came. The former, from Palermo, Milan and Trieste, then wrote to me to tell me that they had eaten very well and that they would come back with friends. A few years later, the leap. In November 2021, All’Antico Vinaio, opened its first U.S. outpost, in New York.
The most famous sandwich in New York's shop is the La Paradiso mingles yards of mortadella with gobs of stracciatella. As with all great sandwiches, God is in the condiments — in this case, a heavenly pistachio cream that gets a textural boost from a dusting of chopped pistachios, the combined effect of which eats like a chunky pistachio butter.
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